BTjunkie tracker now experiences 50% enlargement in Italian visitor traffic. However, that was predictable.

In 2008 an Italian Court has already ruled that ISPs must block access to the famous tracker The Pirate Bay, which had left millions users without access to the most frequently used site. However, The Pirate Bay decided to reverse the order, and have succeeded in that, as two years ago the Court of Bergamo ruled that non-Italian websites can’t be blocked even if containing copyright infringement.

Recently the Italian Bergamo court has ruled again that The Pirate Bay is off-limits to the citizens of the country. Originally the court decided that the all of the site’s current and future IP addresses and its DNS are to be banned. Italian Internet Service Providers have already begun to enforce the block.

Of course millions of Italians were not pleased with that decision at all. It is obvious that the government cannot filter the Internet unless it is prepared to be describes as the “new China”, as censorship is the standard in the People’s Republic of China. Chinese can’t even access IMDb (Internet Movie Database), because the Great Firewall of China blocks it.

Nevertheless, the whole effort was in vain, as The Pirate Bay changed its IP addresses, which made it work for 50% of the Internet Service Providers again. Their administrators also established a mirror site La Baia. Apart from simply turning to any other existing tracker sites, there are other ways, such as VPN services, which is for example offered by the Pirate Bay for about $7 a month and can also be used to bypass the filtering. So if you are an Italian who can’t give up on The Pirate Bay, sign up for a paid or free VPN service. Thanks to it you can exchange the IP that you get from your Internet Service provider to some anonymous IP address.

Italians have chosen to simply turn to easy alternatives. BTjunkie, which prides on being the most advanced BitTorrent search engine, has experienced a considerable growth of the number of Italian users after the TPB blockade - 50% more Italian visitors as compared to the prior week.

It seems to be the MiniNova story again. After it went legal, its traffic plummeted. But this did not reduce the piracy rate because torrent fans just moved on to another torrent site. This Italian case is something similar.

To me personally I don't think it matters how they plan on attacking the file sharing problem. People will always find a way. That's how the world works. If you base your ban or spy on an IP address well there are always ways to disguise that. It's a NO win so maybe they should just change the way they provide the movies, music & more to us the customer. Cause we do buy. Avatar was highly pirated but didn't stop the high ticket sales on that sucker. Most people I know that saw the pirated copy first then felt they had to go see it in theaters and did.

I don't understand why they try so hard to shut down Torrent trackers, then all they do it write about it in the news! The news is the BEST form of advertising, and especially when they put up the web sites name, and what it does. The news must attract at least a couple thousand new users a day